As they have built their Marketing Cloud, Oracle and others have invested mightily in making acquisitions to fill solution gaps in functional areas. Unfortunately for them, millennials are not
behaving the way traditional software buyers have in the past.

We are quickly moving toward the ultimate marketing goal of getting the right message, to the right person, at the right time, and in the right place. But to enable this future, it must be data-driven
and permission based.

Last month (Jan. 6, to be exact,), the Washington, D.C. area received its first snow of the season -- three to five inches, which sent school boards scrambling to assess driving conditions and whether
to delay opening or closing schools for the day. Most school systems got it right, but one didn't -- setting off a social media storm that would take over Twitter.

The time for going big is now. In Forrester's recent B2B "CMO's Must Evolve or Move On" report, 97 percent of marketing leaders who were surveyed agree with the statement: "Marketing must do things
that it has never done before to be successful." Marketing is playing a larger role in influencing corporate strategy, and other functions. Make sure you're capturing this opportunity at your
organization by thinking -- and by being -- "Big."

Even though buyers mention social media (and providers such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) when asked to rate their usage and the usefulness of channels when searching for vendors, they fall off
the grid when asked to evaluate their influence.

The potential for Pininterest in B2B is this - a picture is worth a 1000 words. We are rebuilding a web site for a professional services firm. The "knowledge center" portion of the site is being redesigned to resemble Pinterest in order to carry Infograhics. With the proliferation of content on the "www," visual images that can summarize data heavy content and make it quickly scannable is the future. Pinterest for B2B will evolve this way. Good post Ryan.

Maybe we're trying to measure the value of social media the wrong way. Because corporate marketing is driving social activities at many organizations, the default to trying to fit it to a traditional ROI view. Perhaps we're using it at the wrong part of the funnel and the real value of social media is at the bottom of the funnel - as a customer retention/loyalty lever. Measuring engagement level as an indicator of customer retention has been done by Gallup. They are now working on how it applies to Social Media. Maybe this is the real payoff. Think about the value of having brand advocates enabled with social tools to ramp up word of mouth campaigns...now that will produce real results!